Tuesday, September 23, 2014

On Bullying. On
Wonder. On the Narrow Road. And on
Ovations of the Standing Kind.

I opened
his backpack only to pull out 4 individually foil wrapped chocolate chip
cookies, stale and crumbled. “Why?”

“I
thought I ate those.”

“Well, clearly Joe, you didn’t. Why?”

Silence.

“Please just tell me.”

“I
thought I ate them.”

“The
truth!”

Silence. Then.
“Someone made fun of me for bringing in a cookie. He said it was weird.”

My
oldest son. Bright, funny, fine in all
respects has been bullied since the start of the school year. Something he never even talked about, just
swallowing the sadness of isolation and uncertainty until it started showing up
in likely places: stomach pain that wouldn’t go away, sloppy errors that have
cost him in his favorite subjects, staring off into space, books left
untouched.

I
consider myself a vigilant parent, but I didn’t see the signs because I wasn’t
looking for them. I saw them clearly in
his younger brother, and Sam also will tell me when something is bothering him. But Joe?
He’s getting older. The lines
that divide fitting in and not, appearing cool and not being are becoming
cloudy and unclear.

Small
for his age with a smile that can take on the world, he has always made friends
easily. Not altogether that strong, but
eager to participate, he’s always picked for games outside. But the factions that I thought would come
later, and to be very honest, I believed would not affect his gender this
early, have come and Joe has found himself on the outside of the 4th
grade in crowd.

Joe is
my introduction to motherhood. And it
isn’t easy. Missing my own mother, used
to being entirely on my own, finding myself responsible for a child who would
never sleep, and couldn’t nap unless he was held, was an exercise in daily,
relentless torture. Some days we’d have
a staring contest, me looking into eyes that resembled my own, eyelashes that
WERE mine once, and wondering if we’d ever be on the same side.

That day
came. And fast, and I’ve found him to
be exactly like me, but the souped-up version.
The better one, the more compassionate, the more

"Just lean on me Mommy, when it hurts."

forgiving, the
smarter. Every day he amazes me with
his mind, his insight and his uncanny ability to read people with a precision
that he doesn’t just save for books.

This
child. Extraordinary. This child has been isolated. Told he’s weird. Told he’s “too pretty.”
Told he’s not wanted. His
difference has struck constantly, as swift and painful as any weapon in the
wrong hands….

When I
heard “Wonder” for the first time off of Natalie Merchant’s 1995 album, I loved
it. Because it gave voice to something
not often spoken, and that was of an exceptional child who could manage and
better, inspire and transcend any limitations given. R.J. Palacio was inspired by the song too, and moreover an encounterwith just such a child, outside an ice cream shop in NYC. An episode that left her shaken due to her
own visible and unkind reaction to a child with Treacher Collins syndrome and
how she was ever, ever going to be able to address it and teach her sons how to
as well. (In fact, her chapter called
“Carvel” in the book narrated by Jack Will is an almost verbatim rendition of
that real life scene that planted the seed for Wonder, the

novel.) It
was a sum of experience and song, I guess that gave rise to what I think should
be required reading for every parent and child and others in this family human.

The
novel is supposed to be about August Pullman, who enters the 5th
grade as a regular middle school student.
Until this time he’s been homeschooled; while Palacio doesn’t make it
clear whether or not Auggie has TC, she seems to allude to the fact that his
condition is even more rare, a combination of TC and something else that cause
his abnormalities to be extreme. But
that’s what Auggie’s got on the outside.
On the inside he has a devoted older sister Olivia “Via,” parents who’ve
remained together and love him to distraction.
….and new friends at this hive of absolutely shocking displays of
bullying, fitting in and puberty called Middle School.

You can
imagine the story. You can imagine the
backlash. My heart hurt just to consider
it. And your own flashbacks of
instances when you were left wanting come back in a ferocity of needing the
injustices to come to be righted immediately.
Because it’s clear that he’ll be bullied. And you hope the young children chosen by the administrator, Mr.
Tushman, will ease August’s way through.
And for me, well, I would hope that my child, if placed in that
circumstance, would be one of them.

My son
Joe is 9 and a voracious reader. We are
kin in more ways than one. So this
summer before he started 4th grade, I started him on Wonder. Because we talk often about the moments when you can choose what
is right instead of what is easy. And
this book amplifies just those choices.
For Summer Dawson, a pretty and popular girl, it is negotiating that gap
between childhood and girlhood with unease.
She simply refuses to go blindly into conformity. She’s chosen to remain true to herself,
which means sitting with a kid who’s different just because she likes him. And still believing in unicorns, and
escaping a popular kid Halloween

party because she’s confronted with abandoning
Auggie as a friend, and as a reward, to have full entry into the popular clique
of girls as well as a chance to be Auggie's tormentor, Julian Alban’s, girlfriend. Her decision shocked me, because she asks to
use the bathroom, calls her mom and quietly slips out into the night, watching
the Halloween parade and noting, sadly, that among the “Skeletons. Pirates.
Princesses. Vampires. Superheroes” there is not a single unicorn. Her courage doesn’t seem to shake her; it’s
a deep sense of knowing herself, knowing what she is ready for and not being
moved a minute earlier than she needs to be.

Miranda,
Via’s former best friend opts into the in-crowd just as Via is standing on her
own. But what she finds there among the
bright shining stars is vast space and emptiness. No comfort. No love. So she winds her way back like an errant
slack yo-yo to the Pullmans. After
severing your friendship, finding there a hopeful soft spot on which to land
takes not a small part of grit and none of it graceful and yet, Miranda
navigates between the two.

For Via.
So long in the shadow of a sibling who needs so much. A crusader and mouthpiece for her family. But also a teenage girl. She never had to make a choice, it was made
for her. And the daily amount of
audacity needed to brave the world not of her choosing, where nothing is quite
that easy and everything requires patience and compassion, that is something
else altogether.

And Jack Will a popular, good-looking boy, it is a struggle to fit his new
feelings of genuine friendship with August over his discomfort in aligning
himself with the school “freak.” He’ll
put himself in direct opposition to Julian, the wealthy, popular child
who runs a pretty tight crew. And his
innate understanding that in choosing August over Julian meant that he wasn’t
going to be popular. But he didn’t know
that the “entire grade would be turned against” him for doing it. As he says, “It just feels so weird to not
have people talking to you, pretending you don’t even exist.”

The cast
is set against a progressive private school

where an English teacher, Mr.
Browne introduces everyone to his precepts, which are “Rules about really
important things.” And more, his one
for back-to-school, for September:

“When given the choice between being right or
being kind. Choose kind.”

So
that’s what we see. The characters
trying to navigate what it means to not be right and be kind and realizing that
most often, they coincide. Wonder
strikes a deep blue soul chord because of this. Because we, as readers, as people, as family, know this is all
true. I think it is amazing that Jack
can take the ostracism. More so that
Summer marches to her own unicorn beat without thought of the perception of
others. That Miranda finds herself back
into the fold that is unpopular but better for her soul. That Via finds balance. But I never thought truth would play out of
the fiction. And I never thought that
my bright, beautiful, engaging and compassionate boy would be on the receiving end of
unkind. And I am broken for it.

It
started innocuously enough, at one of the two events that make up a young
child’s entire social component of school: lunch (recess being the other). Table seating is assigned and Joe started
hearing jokes and stories that he still refuses to repeat. He wouldn’t join in the mocking of teachers,
students and the curses that other children threw into the air like confetti. He didn’t want to engage in it, so he
remained silent, then when pushed, "I don't think that's right." Condemning the action without hurting another. And that was
enough to get him blackballed, marked from the outset.

Before
too long, even though he would go up to the ringleader, my own son’s “Julian,”
and say, “hi,” he heard the boy say to others, “Did you hear anything? I didn’t hear anything?” Just like what happens to Jack Will, the
campaign of slow freeze had begun.

We’ve
talked about this, constantly. I want
my children to be the ones to stand up for the lonely. Befriend those who don’t have anyone. Sit at the lunch table with the new
kid.

Stand on
the side of what is “right” rather than “what is easy.” Because I remember how much I would have
longed for it as the teasing for me increased in elementary and then the
horrors of middle school boys whose collective torment is still enough for a
quick heart stop nightmare of remembrance.
I wish I’d had the courage to do it later, but suffering under my own
cloud of difference I didn’t want anything else marking me as other, even if it
meant standing with someone else who was.
But I suffered, and I wanted to be sure that my children wouldn’t
instigate or participate in the othering, choosing instead to be better. Take a higher road, consider the person
rather than the cool.

So Joe,
obedient and cognizant, did. Just like
Jack. But it was a failure because I
didn’t prepare him. I didn’t prepare
him, and didn’t consider, the loneliness that accompanies the right side.

And I am
sorry for that. So sorry Joe. Because being right isn’t like the movies or
in books. It can be very, very, very
lonely.

It’s
easier to go with the crowd. To say
that you don’t like someone, or say nothing at all while someone else spews
venom at another. It is the complicity
in hatred that causes all the hurt. And
it hurts. It hurts to know it and it
hurts to do nothing about it. And it
hurts just as much to do the right thing for it. It will require courage, tremendous courage to stand in the face
of what you know will hurt you and say, “no.”

It will
require even more courage to try again after being told no in return. That’s the more difficult, the narrow, the
harder path. It’s what you’ve been
taught. It’s what we believe.Our family follows the instruction of a God
whose son walked that same

road and walks it with you today. Many stones in the path and a lot of
maddening crowd all around.And still
it’s the path that I am asking you to choose.Despite the pain I know you will face.
I see more of God’s sacrifice now.Because being on the side of right means asking you to endure pain.And that is not anything I would knowingly
wish for you.

When
your life is spent with a maximum height of 5’, your perspective necessarily
shifts that way, and a school’s concrete walls can seem like insurmountable barriers
erected for the sole purpose of loneliness.
Left alone in the lunchroom, ignored at his table, not invited to play
at recess, Joe looked around to eliminate anything else that would mark him. And he never told. Not once. Bright and
quiet, he retreated to a shy spot. His
teacher hasn’t had long enough to get to know the Joe BEFORE. He just is not equipped with the language of
exclusion. It’s a country that no one
wants to be in.

So I
told his homeroom teacher, and she has taken decisive and quick action. Because she gets it. And because she’s compassionate and kind and
amazing and made sense of my stumbly words.
We made a plan. She changed his
lunch table in front of me. She
understood just what this is. I asked
his math and science teachers to allow him to sit with friends until the acute
crisis had passed. While their sluggish
response, for whatever reason only known to them, has lagged longer than I would have liked, Joe
has squared his small shoulders and told me that Friday was a “better
day.” We talked and talked and talked
about anything but that this weekend allowing his personality to shake itself
off on the shores of what is familiar.

But this
morning, I pulled out those cookies.
And I realized how deep and dark this place is for him. How treacherous the terrain is for a child
once

difference is realized and utilized against him. How disappointed I am that children this young are using newly
found and formed language to belittle and repel.How saddened I am that parental neglect finds itself exactly in
the formation of character because that’s how we are judged. How lonely the isle of right is. How much I wish other children at his table
would land there too.

I could
have told him to retreat. Allowed him
to stay in front of a computer or another flashing screen to lose himself in
virtual reality. But that’s not life;
that is not reality. Life is a gift
meant to be lived. Virtual simulation
holds no candle to it. And that’s what
God wants for Joe. And for all the kids
in his class.

"It's a beautiful evening when you can be sitting on a stone step and looking up into the night sky." --Joe, a very wise 9.

And living life means
standing in the face of it: the brutality and the beauty of it. It means engaging more with other children,
no matter how scary, rather than less.
It means ripping off the shielding bandage so the sun and light and air
can begin to heal the wound. Those
scars are going to fade over time. It
doesn’t matter that you know that I wish they had never been made.

The fact
is that I cannot spare him what is to come.
I can meet, talk and plead for understanding. But I cannot take away the children who choose to place my son on
the outside of the circle. He will see
it again, and again and again. This is
the first of many moments where he will have to find words, and use them to
rent his way and stay his ground and fight for his right to be there. “Tell them,” I say, “tell them that you love
cookies and it’s completely fine to bring them.”
He looks at me. “Offer to bring
them in one too.” But Joe is
cautious. “I’ll try the first one,” he
says uncertainly.

At the
end of Wonder, August is given
an award for outstanding student. He finds himself called to the podium by the
awesome Mr. Tushman who quotes the American social reformer and abolitionist,
Henry Ward Beecher, “Greatness lies not in being strong but in the right using
of strength…. He is the greatest whose
strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.” August deserves the

award because of his
quiet strength has carried the most hearts.
But I don’t think it’s actually true and neither does August. “To me, though, I’m just me. An ordinary kid,” he says, “But hey, if they
want to give me a medal for being me, that’s okay. I’ll take it.”

Because
I think the medal isn’t for August, the standing ovation seems to be for him
but it isn’t. It’s for all of them. For Jack and for Summer. For Via and Miranda. For the kids who chose to be right when it
isn’t easy. An ovation for living your
life despite what may be hard and going through with it anyway. For having the confidence to push through
the dark corridor and to the other side.
Quiet acts of bravery that are amplified in childhood and set a luminous
stage for growth when the choices become more difficult and fraught with
consequences unforeseen.

“Everyone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their life because we all overcometh the world.” --August Pullman

The
novel closes with the children’s precepts and the last one is Auggie’s,
“Everyone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their
life because we all overcometh the world.”
Joe is still in Jack’s chapter when he was mean at Halloween, but I am
hoping he makes it to this part soon.
When I got up last Friday after a knackering day of conferences and
plans and worries and emails and an equally exhausting evening of reliving a
greatest hits album of school rejection, I saw that my morning birds were still
soundly sleeping. I turned on the light
and curled up next to Joe, tracing his nose, and kissing his cheek, singing his
name off key. “Time to get up. Are you awake yet?” He nods and smiles. Hugs and even a laugh. Lately, he’s clung to me in the
morning. Burying his head in my side of
a fuzzy blue robe that’s certainly seen better days and breathing me in the
same way I used to breathe my own mother.
Her very smell would calm me and that fragrance memory is barely there
anymore; it’s a heavy loss. So I
understand it. Some smells of love and
security are strong and unique and unknown.
I am that for him. Maybe a day
will come when he will not need this.
But I am glad it is not today.

“Will
you wake me up every day just like that Mommy?”

Yes, Joe
I will. Because you have to know, you
just have to know in your marrow that every time I see you, hold you to me,
hear you speak there is a resounding chorus.
I hear it over, and over and over again because you Joe, you, are my
standing ovation. You are my
wonder.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

“Shaken by a Low Sound”: A Marriage Power Ballad and
Getting Brave

John was
having a rough time of it. Another head
cold and when you live in perpetual summer in Florida that is no joke. I resent it really, if I can be honest with
you for a minute. Because I rely on him
to say hi and deal with the grumpies when he gets home. I resent then that I have to do it all while
he lies in bed. But even if I huff and
puff in my mind about it, I know it’s not fair. And that a lot of folks have so much more in the way of challenge
and grumpies. Still, I have no
tolerance for shenanigans at bedtime, and John usually does it. Often invoking me as a threat, come to think
of it.

Anyway, we’d been performing this dog and pony show for
awhile and most of the time, we get along just fine. I’m even coming around to thinking he MIGHT actually be
funny (please don't tell him I said so!). But mostly, between the children
and work and school and financial worry, we often just allow our marriage to
lie untended. And that’s when I hear
it.

It’s a
low, slow beat that usually makes me sit up and take notice. A tinnitus of the mind that won’t stop, the
itch at the just past point of your arm's reach on your back that you cannot get
at. That beat that suggests that vows
are starting to shake. It may seem to
be overstating the case, but it isn’t.
Not really. God gives us gut
instincts for a reason. Most of the
time we push them away for fear, or disgust, tiredness or rage, but I think we
need to listen to that low sound and begin to get brave about marriage. I know I do.

I’ve
been married for 14 years and with the guy I married for almost 18. When I met him, I thought he was kind and
smart and a horrifying dresser. In
fact, when we hit some dating bumps, I often wondered if all my hard work in
getting him to realize stripes and plaid did NOT work well and not to always
dress like a waiter (blue shirt, black pants), would end up benefiting another
girl who would have nothing left to do but bask.

God had
other plans, however, and here we are, 3 kids and countless hours later. There’ve been so many reports and stories
about how we focus on the wedding and not the life after and how bad, bad, bad
that is…but I know I did. Did you?

I’m an
only child. My parents who had first
wanted me to marry an Indian-Christian-boy-from-a-good-family nudged me more
than once, then realized that the Indian-Christian-boy-from-a-good-family did
not necessarily translate into good husband material and left me to figure it
out on my own. Then, they quickly began
to despair that I wasn’t going to marry anyone, from any kind of family, ever.

I wanted
to get married, but I’d had a bad time of it, and needed to figure out a lot
about what I was about before I was in any kind of shape to figure out what I
wanted. Enter then John. We met through friends and began a long
distance relationship while I was in Cambridge and John, in Connecticut.

When we
finally did tie the proverbial knot, it was a sweltering day in June, and I was
planned OUT. It was a great party. And then, we headed back to my apartment on
Garden Street and I remember a slow burn panic begin to reach its way up from
my stomach to my heart, “what do I do now?”

A warm day in June

I got
lucky. I really did, because the guy I
married figured out that there was an “after” to the “happily ever” and
reckoned with it even before he produced the ring. Even though there were times I didn’t think so, John really has
been pretty steady. We both had some
growing up to do, and so we bumped and moved, argued and were silent all around
each other for those first few years of finding our feet and then planting
them.

But it
didn’t happen right away. John had
family obligations that he had never really understood how to break the tethers
to, and wasn’t all that convinced he should.
I was just plain old lonely. We
both worked. And then life threw
us. My mom got sick and passed away
four months later. I then got pregnant
with our first child. Then my Dad
developed dementia, a business collapsed, we had children, we lost children.

All the
language that we needed to develop to deal with each other and create an
understanding of our expectations lay wasted and wanting; not a complete
collapse, but just an abandoned project. (This particular folly would come to revisit us, as scary as any theme
park ride when it would rear its ugly head.) And it has, over the years; in the pain of crises, big things have
evaporated to the essence of the small things that were the planks across that relationship bridge that we never finished building. And fights, prayer, help and
sometimes just plain old ignoring it were the strategies that either stalled or
full out failed to make a dent of difference.

But this
is what I know. As tough as it is, I
wouldn’t want to undo it. And I cannot
imagine going through all of this with anyone else. In a world where so much is
disposable, where mistakes can be quickly rectified and challenges walked away from, it
means something to stand and say this means something. You know, maybe the experts that Gwenyth
Paltrow consulted before her own “conscious uncoupling”may be right, because, reasons the authors,
there is no historical precedent for a commitment to last many years. Earlier humans didn’t survive very long,
seems to be the thesis, it is folly to assume that anything should last “for
life” when life expectancy has exceeded past anything in prior generations.

But I don’t think so. For example, we do have better dental care now than in
the past, and typically when there’s a problem, the doctor will work to save
the tooth, rather than yanking it out.
That’s cultural evolution at work too.

You are only one of two people
who knows your story. And so you need
to captain that ship however works the best for you and your family. But for me,

I’ve understood that there is a
deep need to begin again, laying the boards, pushing in the screws, connecting
work together, allowing patches to come before time slips away and sound
becomes loud volume and then loud volume to quiet echo of emptiness.

I wish that I had the husband
that brought me “no reason” flowers or wrote to me or planned surprises, but I
don’t—at least those boards have yet to be laid. But I do have the one that always remembers to leave me a night glass of ice water, reminds me that I have a lot left to write and an eager audience to read it, who clips my Dad's distracted fingernails, and who is the first one to say, "It's going to be fine" while clearing away assorted papers and books from our bed and taking a pen out of my completely tired and unfocused hands--all without complaint. So, before I allow that buzzing to
get too high or too hard, I’ve learned to pay attention to it.

Look at the awesome we accomplished!

When I hear it that discordant noise, I know
now that I’ve got to mind it. Before it
becomes so loud and brash that it drowns out everything else and then all you
think about is discord and wrong and never about harmony or right. And this requires courage on my part,
because I believe that I am always right. Always. That’s just the way it is. And because of that fervent belief, it
becomes difficult to listen to another storyteller’s rendition of the same.

Brave on
some days of a low beat may mean putting away the
shoes/clothes/books/papers/insert-annoying-thing-here that have been waiting
for some kind of millennial strike to actually happen. And then, here’s the peach: saying NOTHING
about it.

Brave on
another day may be just saying, “hey you’re even better looking now than when we got married.” Even if
I haven’t heard any such thing in return or first for more than a little while.

And then
brave may be me getting to the heart of the trouble by just asking a simple
question and focusing for an entire 5 minutes on the answer. Even if nothing else is said, just waiting
out the silence for the rest to come.

And then there’s the brave that comes with 80s power ballads like those from Chicago. Because after a whole evening full of feeding and bathing and snuggles and last drinks of water and irritation and threats, I hobbled off to bed myself instead of leaving John alone and me reading in the family room. I'd heard the low sound, and decided that our marriage couldn't be alone and cold remedied. And that’s what, looking through my phone, I decided to serenade John with that night. And it wasn’t the Chicago classics that this “true rock-n-roll” guy likes (25 or 6 to 4, Saturday in the Park), no sir, it was full on “Hard Habit to Break,” “You’re the Inspiration,” and when the groans of “please stop, my ears are bleeding," to a final “Will You Still Love Me?”

We both
started laughing, and John, coughing, and I finally let him sleep while I
wondered whatever happened to the Thompson Twins. But the next morning, he asked me, “Hey, was it a Nyquil terror
or were you singing bad Chicago to me last night?” “Oh, no. That was AWESOME
Chicago, and you are so welcome!”
Pause. “Ah. Okay, that was fun.” And the accompanying grin that went with it, seemed to send the sound right back below, down deep to rest until it could hear a fissure from above to crawl to.

Sometimes life is
just about being brave and reaching out without thinking a lot. Sometimes
connections are strung and held with fine silver thin filament. Sometimes
those are the strongest to hold and the most difficult to disengage.
Sometimes repairs need to be made under the exhaustingly relentless eye of a
microscope where you are standing, in clunky shoes staring down for hours with
careful hands, ready to cauterize whatever is hopelessly broken.
And sometimes that has a soundtrack; and that soundtrack is a Diane Warren
compiled, David Foster produced, 80s MTV permed mullet power ballad. For
today that worked. Tomorrow it may be another song entirely.

And I get it, I
do. Because after literally 10,000
times of these statements, you may wish that your dearest and darlingest
children would be somewhere else, even for five solitary, delicious
minutes.

But
that’s not me.

My boys,
with the exception of a few mornings, were with me all 71 days of the summer break. I have the pictures to prove
it! And we went all over the place. To museums and parks to pools and
movies. And usually, after an outing
they resorted back to being relentlessly bored. So we played board games, and we read. Probably not as much as we should have but we did. We just were and I cast a melancholic look
toward Fall.

Their
school supplies, which I ordered through a company, lay in its substantial box
in a corner, untouched and unopened. I
didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to
sort. I didn’t want to have anything at
all to do with it. Because once that
launch sequence of sorting and separating and backpacks began, then it signaled
school…like it or not.

You know
what? I miss them terribly. I used to send the kids to camp. And when they were so small and so
ferociously needing of attention to minor things, it was a wonderful option, a
heaven sent opportunity to have them safely guided by a capable adult and
entertained for some hours so I could battle an infant. But now, now that they can feed themselves
(sort of), wipe themselves (hopefully) and do not need the minutiae of care
they required when they were so very small, they’re more than a little all right.

So when
we would go out the last few days of break

Back to School shopping

and they’d act like their squirrely
whirly selves, I’d get more than one sympathetic glance and a conspirator-like,
“Boy, three boys huh? You’re brave. You must be so glad school is
starting.” I would smile most of the
time because Jake would most likely be in a headlock and I was actually worried
that we’d need to take a third trip for stitches that form his very very short
life on this earth. But the last few
times, I looked the conspirator in the eye and said, “Nope. I’m not happy in the least. I’ll miss them terribly. They are the highlight of my summer.” And another, “They are the best handful of
anything I’ve ever had in my life.” And
another, “I’ve had more cool and weird conversations than any I’ve been a part
of.”

I never,
ever signed up for this. Staying at
home, filling out endless forms when occupation is listed not being able to put
down “teacher/lecturer/assistant professor” something I trained a long, long
time for and went through countless graduate seminars, and wrote a really long
book to achieve. I have watched my
colleagues all go on and get tenured positions throughout the country and a lot
of them have found ways to balance having a family with the work they find
valuable and rewarding. But
circumstances placed me here and life shifted as it often does. I had to rework who I was. I had to find new friends. My world became necessarily smaller.

“You can
finally write now,” my earnest husband

told me, but between the infant that
wouldn’t sleep and my sadness about my mother, I couldn’t come

up with much of
anything. Then, he grew and we had
another and more life spilled out and around and we had a third and the things
that I thought I would do or be about seemed to take a necessary step back from
changing and feeding and caring and showing and aching and talking and running
and looking always downward at wee feet and faces and soothing hurts real and
perceived. Who I thought I’d grow up to
be seemed to be staring conversely at me through a telescope of unknown.

My
writing, my hope for writing, took a long and dusty back seat to the life that
was happening rightthisinstant. Because
that’s what my children needed. Not the
“wait just a second while I finish this,” because if I did, paint was all over
the carpet in defiant rebellion or something else. Engagement requires presence.
And back then, television provided no (happy) substitute for my time. When they started school, I was hard pressed
to find filler.

I had gone 100mph for
so long, reading into the small hours, grading papers, talking with students,
and you have no idea what a joy-killer is a faculty meeting. So I volunteered, with the encouragement of
my friends who thought I needed to keep busy.
And I brought all my skills with me.
I volunteered at the boys’ preschool and I made wonderful friends, some
of the best people I’ve known, and I worked long and hard and difficult hours
for no pay because I was trained in my work-brain to do that. I dealt with an unreasonable and angry and
ungrateful Director of the school, again who had no sense that I was a
volunteer while she was being paid. I
did this for 3 years.

And then
we moved, and I still had my youngest child, an ill father and now a new
predicament: an abject allergy to all things “volunteer.” I needed a torrential amount of recovery
from that experience, despite the good I’d done and the friends I’d made. And it truly wasn’t the volunteering in and
of itself, because I enjoyed learning more about the boys’ school and I think
teachers require all the support they don’t often have (and that’s a whole
other story. You know it all already; I
know you do. That they do back/bank
breaking work for our kids and contrary to what common impressions might be, there
are no summers off, they are always working for our children).

The
point of the blotchy hives my mind made when suggestions of the “V” word came
up were self-inflicted. I worked hard,
but only the way in which I knew how to work.
And that brings up the other piece of this back to school business: the
echoing negative space that surrounded me once my youngest started Kindergarten
this Fall.

I have
now 6 hours during a normal school day, give or take, in which to “do something
else.” I began to wonder if, in fact,
my identity had been so absorbed in anticipating the needs of my children that
that’s “all” that I was, or if that is what I’ve chosen to believe.

Here’s
what I think: yes, your perspective necessarily shifts when you decide to stay
at home and it has to, there is a very immediate and necessary being that needs
to be kept alive and whose sole existence is dependent upon you. But here is something else, as much as it
seems that we uphold motherhood as a “very tough job” we simultaneously belittle
it. (i.e. So you “just stay at
home?”) I don’t have to convince you
about how difficult it is, chances are you have lived it or are living it now. But this worrisome, nagging fear that you
need to be doing more, or that you aren’t doing enough. It isn’t coming from you—it’s coming from
the schizophrenic world that cannot decide a woman’s worth.

The
women who I’ve met since I’ve been at home with my kids are among the most
fascinating people I’ve ever met.
They’ve come from all fields and areas of the world. Their lived experiences are vastly different
from my own and chances are I wouldn’t have met them any other way—my working
life almost made sure of it. (It was
difficult to engage with anyone else, for me, who wasn’t also an
academic.) These women worked in fields
that boggled the brain and they had extraordinary, prodigious output and
ethic. These are women who can, and
probably should, run the world. Instead they’ve turned the entirety of their immeasurable focus
inward towards their homes and, specifically, their children taking that time
and talent, thirst for knowledge, ceaseless energy and hunger for good and put
it toward small people who would benefit from it…and still are.

Because
there is no negative space. That’s all
just playing with us, that “who am I now?” stuff? That’s not you; it’s the wide world that cannot understand the
importance of supporting women. Despite the hugely successful work of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn casting urgent light on the needs of improving and empowering women across the world, in the West there still seems to still be this division in how we value women and their role in the marketplace and the home.

Consider, this mother who has stayed home for 5 to 6 years full time
until her child was at a point that they could go to school. She still wants and needs to be there for
her children when they get home, and studies have shown that the
hours of 3-6pm are typically when unsupervised children get into trouble. She needs to find a job that will allow her
to see those children off safely and be there when they get home, because the
economy is still in free fall and she could use the money or maybe she just
wants to flex some muscles that haven’t had that particular exercise in awhile.

Imagine,
if you will, if this crazy world decided to tap into this amazing mind market
and hire these women from 10-1, these former passionate and brilliant
go-getters in their chosen fields, imagine how their cost overhead would be
lowered and how productive they would be.

Imagine
if they tapped into the

world’s best investment: mothers.

They could begin again to bring that extraordinary
strength that they’ve devoted to making their children into competent and kind
citizens back out to your company. And
let me tell you, they’ve perfected it.
And I don’t know about you, but I’ll take 100 great citizens over a 1000 anybody elses any day.

But
until that happens, until they get it, I understand that it is a struggle. But it doesn’t have to be. Please know that, I’m the girlfriend telling
you this, please, please, please, give yourself a break. You have not wasted your training or your
time, your degree or your life. It all
prepared you for this ride, for this moment when you put your child on that bus
or in that classroom and they looked at you with confidence and joy letting you
know that they had this.

You are
being promoted. That’s what this
is. It’s not a matter of “what am I”
but “what can’t I do?” you’ve just
prepared a person who came into the world utterly vulnerable into a confident
child who is

prepared to absorb and be a vital part of community. It’s a promotion to look at what’s next,
because you still have that job too, and from what I hear, that job of keeping
the joy and confidence in check grows in challenge. But because you are so capable of doing that job that God has
equipped you for mama, you!; you can now turn your eye inward towards
something that is not sacrificial, but something you want to do. And I’m going to cheer you on.

I could look back and wonder at what could have been, but
in doing so I will never really able to keep my gaze clearly forward. I can get an administrative job and have my
check go toward gas, parking, fees and childcare for those critical hours
(because that is what it would happen in my family). But what I’ve

chosen to do is double down on my ability to write
and my dream of finishing a book. A
story I’ve nurtured and researched for years that I can finally begin to write
now. (And also why I haven’t been as consistent in posting as I’ve been in the
past. Know that you’ve helped me start
this heart’s desire. It’s so exciting.)

I know you’ll have my back, because that’s what women do. The world needs to catch on.

While
this promotion to full-time writer is a great one, I am still necessarily
invested in my primary all-day job of mom.
Because these children that I didn’t think would survive me and my own
whackadoodleness? They are the most
inspiring, supportive people I know.
Their dreaming gives my writing a voice. It’s interchangeable. There was a time I breathed for them, now
they do it for me. However you begin
the step of reclamation in addition to who you are now, however you
wish to begin a new narrative of self, do so with great excitement and courage
because you’ve done every single thing you have tackled well, and you deserve
this. And so do the small people
watching you.

They are
going to school. Under the talented and
thorough eyes of adults that are not me, they will learn not only subjects but
life skills of communication and interaction and citizenship that I could not
undertake alone. But…I will not be
jumping for joy. I will not be coolly
relieved. I will go back into my all
too quiet house, make a cup of tea and sit down at the computer all the while
looking at the time in the corner. And
I will wait for my house to be filled with life and yelling and laughter and
joy, because that’s exactly what I signed up for, and lucky for me—the
ride is turning out to be better than I ever thought it would.

Congratulations
Mommy, here’s to the next unbelievable chapter in your continuing story. I can’t wait to watch it unfold.

What the story said...my reviews on goodreads

“You must understand, this is one of those moments.” “What moments?” “One of the moments you keep to yourself,” he said. “What do you mean?” I said. “why?” “We’re in a war,” he said. “The story of this war—dates, names, who started it, why—that belongs to everyone. [….] But something like this—this is yours. It belongs only to you. And me. Only to us” (56). This moment, in Téa Obreht’s lyrical first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, tells you the entirety of the story of love and loss, of memory, maps and war, of science, fables and imagined histories. The tale, set in a fictional Balkan province, is about the relationship between the narrator, Natalia and her grandfather who is a doctor. And the story involves the wars that have ravaged that area for years.

If you think back to the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, you may remember the horror and shock of those years of unending war. The bombing of a 400 year old bridge, the massacres, the deadening of Sarajevo. While none of these events are overtly, or even covertly, covered in the novel, their echo remains. This is a novel whose strength lies in the ability to translate myth and fable, to make the moments that seem almost unknowable known. The excerpt offered in the beginning of this review is an example of that, the Grandfather takes the young Natalia past curfew to witness the surreal site of a starving elephant being led on the city streets to the closed city zoo, the place of their weekly pilgrimages. During mercurial times, there was this moment of placidity and fantasy. The war which raged and continued and was irrational as wars are, there is the fantastical presence of an elephant sloping up the quiet neighborhood street. While Natalia frets that no one will believe her, her grandfather corrects her idea by telling her that history can be something personalized and intimate. Not meant to be shared by the world, but by those who you love and trust to see your vision. It makes sense, because when histories are challenged and threatened, documents concerning your birth, the death of your families are challenged or lost, history becomes something far more ephemeral. Far more illusory unless it is placed in the permanence of your own heart.

She begins Chapter 2 by saying, “Everything necessary to understand my Grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man” (32). So it is between these poles of myth and story that we can locate the history of this narrator and her grandfather, both physicians, both straddling the line between science and home remedy. I could tell you at length about both, but that truly would be spoiling the journey of the story for you. But I will say that the language Obreht uses is so languid and lush, masterful and mindful that you begin to be seduced by it all. So reason, the questions of markings of slippery occurrences of war that do belong to the world that could ground the reader in the world Obreht is translating is lost because that is the moment she is NOT choosing to share. But here is the thing. I needed it. Even in a footnote or an afterward. I needed a timeline of the events that brought the destruction of these people to such impossibilities of existence. Because even though it is a public history, it is one I do not know well. It would be wrong to assume the knowledge on the part of a Western audience I think, it’s unfortunate that this is not a familiar landscape or language. I know, in the recesses of my mind I know the wars in the Balkans. The horrors, the rape camps of Bosnia, the destruction, the evacuation of Serbians…but I don’t know enough, not nearly enough to be lulled into this lush tale. A part of me refused to be completely seduced by it. Because I didn’t understand enough about it.

There is a way in which myth sustains us when horrors are too much. When person and home and identity fall away, and where you cannot locate your birthplace on a map, because it has been eliminated, what do you hold onto except your stories? As the author writes, “We had used a the map on every road trip we had ever taken, and it showed in the marker scribbling all over it: the crossed-out areas we were supposed to avoid…. I couldn’t find Zdrevkov, the place where my grandfather died, on that map. I couldn’t find Brejevina either, but I had known in advance that it was missing, so we had drawn it in” (16). Map lines, map dots, erased and redrawn because of war. How do you locate who you are, if you cannot really know where you are from? The erasing of history, of place, of belonging, of self is such a legitimate tragic legacy of war. So it is understandable that the novel moves between these two myths to bookend it, asking the reader to locate the grandfather and the narrator in its midst. I just think that the novel, which is a remarkable achievement for such a young writer, would have been that much more strong, viscerally, had it had the historical reference points it alluded to. That being said, though, it is a novel of quiet questions and loud answers and makes you wonder long after you’ve set it aside. Questions like, “What is the moment you have? The one you find that belongs to you? Who will you share it with and what familiar myth might you create?”